A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

Summary

In this groundbreaking book, journalist and innovation expert Warren Berger shows that one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in business and in our daily lives is a simple, under-appreciated tool—one that has been available to us since childhood. Questioning—deeply, imaginatively, “beautifully”—can help us identify and solve problems, come up with game-changing ideas, and pursue fresh opportunities. So why are we often reluctant to ask “Why?”

Berger's surprising findings reveal that even though children start out asking hundreds of questions a day, questioning “falls off a cliff” as kids enter school. In an education and business culture devised to reward rote answers over challenging inquiry, questioning isn't encouraged—and, in fact, is sometimes barely tolerated.

And yet, as Berger shows, the most creative, successful people tend to be expert questioners. They've mastered the art of inquiry, raising questions no one else is asking-and finding powerful answers. The author takes us inside red-hot businesses like Google, Netflix, IDEO, and Airbnb to show how questioning is baked into their organizational DNA. He also shares inspiring stories of artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, basement tinkerers, and social activists who changed their lives and the world around them-by starting with a “beautiful question.” Berger explores important questions, such as:

- Why aren't we nurturing kids' natural ability to question-and what can parents and schools do about that?

- Since questioning is a starting point for innovation, how might companies and business leaders begin to encourage and exploit it?

- And most important, how can each of us re-ignite that questioning spark-and use inquiry as a powerful means to rethink and reinvent our lives?A More Beautiful Question outlines a practical Why / What If / How system of inquiry that can guide you through the process of innovative questioning-helping you find imaginative, powerful answers to your own “beautiful questions.”

Why Questioning?

As a journalist, I’ve been asking questions my whole professional life. But until a few years ago, I hadn’t thought much about the art or the science of questioning. And I never considered the critical role questioning plays in enabling people to innovate, solve problems, and move ahead in their careers and lives.

That changed during my work¹ on a series of articles, and eventually a book, on how designers, inventors, and engineers come up with ideas and solve problems. My research brought me in contact with some of the world’s leading innovators and creative minds. As I looked at how they approached challenges, there was no magic formula, no single explanation, for their success. But in searching for common denominators among these brilliant change-makers, one thing I kept finding was that many of them were exceptionally good at asking questions.

For some of them, their greatest successes—their breakthrough inventions, hot start-up companies, the radical solutions they’d found to stubborn problems—could be traced to a question (or a series of questions) they’d formulated and then answered.

I thought this was intriguing, but it only had a small part in the book I was working on, so I tucked the idea away. Subsequently, I began to notice—as is often the case when something has come onto your radar—that questioning seemed to be everywhere I looked. In the business world, for instance, as I interviewed corporate executives for my writing in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company, I found a great deal of interest in questioning. Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that runs on questions,² and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything.

Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices. On the contrary, many companies—whether consciously or not—have established cultures that tend to discourage inquiry in the form of someone’s asking, for example, Why are we doing this particular thing in this particular way?

Much the same could be said about schools. Here again, as I talked to educators, I found a genuine interest in the subject—many teachers acknowledge it’s critically important that students be able to formulate and ask good questions. Some of them also realize that this skill is apt to be even more important in the future, as complexity increases and change accelerates. Yet, for some reason, questioning isn’t taught in most schools—nor is it rewarded (only memorized answers are).

In talking to social entrepreneurs working on big, thorny global problems of poverty, hunger, and water supply, I found that only a few rare innovators were focused on the importance of asking the right questions about these issues. For the most part, the old, entrenched practices and approaches tend to hold sway. The nonprofit sector, like much of industry, is inclined to keep doing what it has done—hence, well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.

In a way, this is true of all of us, in our everyday lives. The impulse is to keep plowing ahead, doing what we’ve done, and rarely stepping back to question whether we’re on the right path. On the big questions of finding meaning, fulfillment, and happiness, we’re deluged with answers—in the form of off-the-shelf advice, tips, strategies from experts and gurus. It shouldn’t be any wonder if those generic solutions don’t quite fit: To get to our answers, we must formulate and work through the questions ourselves. Yet who has the time or patience for it?

On some level, we must know—as the business executive knows, as the schoolteacher knows—that questions are important and that we should be paying more attention to them, especially the meaningful ones. The great thinkers have been telling us this since the time of Socrates. The poets have waxed on the subject: E. E. Cummings, from whom I borrowed this book’s title, wrote, Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question. Artists from Picasso to Chuck Close have spoken of questioning’s inspirational power. (This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: "Ask yourself an interesting enough question³ and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.")

Scientists, meanwhile, have been great proponents of questioning, with Einstein among the most vocal champions. He was asking smart questions from age four (when he wondered why the compass pointed north), and throughout his life Einstein saw curiosity as something holy. Though he wondered about a great many things, Einstein was deliberate in choosing which questions to tackle: In one of his more well-traveled quotes—which he may or may not have actually said—he reckoned that if he had an hour⁴ to solve a problem and his life depended on it, he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was answering the right question.

With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is questioning underappreciated in business, undertaught in schools, and underutilized in our everyday lives?

Part of it may be that we see questioning as something so fundamental and instinctive that we don’t need to think about it. We come out of the womb questioning, noted the small-schools-movement pioneer Deborah Meier. And it’s true—any preschooler can ask questions easily and profusely. A recent study found the average⁵ four-year-old British girl asks her poor mum 390 questions a day; the boys that age aren’t far behind. So then, it might be said that questioning is like breathing: It’s a given, an essential and accepted part of life, and something that anyone, even a child, can do.

Yet chances are, for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never again ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shining moment. Unless she is exceptional, that age is her questioning peak.

This curious fact, in and of itself, gives rise to all sorts of questions.

Why does that four-year-old girl begin to question less at age five or six?

What are the ramifications of that, for her and for the world around her?

And if, as Einstein tells us, questioning is important, why aren’t we trying to stem or reverse that decline by finding ways to keep questioning alive?

On the other hand, that four-year-old may turn out to be an exception; she may be one of the rare people who doesn’t stop questioning, like Bezos and Jobs, or like one of the master questioners featured in this book. And if that’s the case, well, that raises questions, too.

Why do some keep questioning, while others stop? (Was it something in the genes, in the schools, in the parenting?)

And if we look at the questioners versus the nonquestioners, who seems to be coming out ahead?

The business world has a kind of love/hate relationship with questioning. The business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen⁶—himself a master questioner—observes that questioning is seen as inefficient by many business leaders, who are so anxious to act, to do, that they often feel they don’t have time to question just what it is they’re doing.

And those not in leadership roles frequently perceive (often correctly) that questioning can be hazardous to one’s career: that to raise a hand in the conference room and ask Why? is to risk being seen as uninformed, or possibly insubordinate, or maybe both.

Yet—as recently documented in a fascinating research study of thousands of top business executives—the most creative, successful business leaders have tended to be expert questioners. They’re known to question the conventional wisdom of their industry, the fundamental practices of their company, even the validity of their own assumptions. This has not slowed their rise in business—rather, it has turbocharged it,⁷ to quote Hal Gregersen, a business consultant and INSEAD professor who, along with Christensen and another business professor, Jeff Dyer, coauthored the research showing questioning to be a key success factor among innovative executives.

Indeed, the ability to ask the right questions has enabled business leaders to adapt in a rapidly changing marketplace, Gregersen notes. Inquiring minds can identify new opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become aware of them. All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have all the answers in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers.

Considering all of this, one almost can’t help but ask the following:

If we know (or at least strongly suspect) that questioning is a starting point for innovation, then why doesn’t business embrace it?

Why don’t companies train people to question and create systems and environments that would encourage them to keep doing so?

And if companies were to do this, how might they go about it?

Regarding those first two questions, one possible answer—and it may also apply to similar questions about why nonprofit organizations don’t question more, and why schools don’t teach or encourage questioning—is that questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power—not something that is done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning.

Anything that forces people to have to think is not an easy sell, which highlights the challenge of questioning in our everyday lives—and why we don’t do it as much as we might or should. Clearly, it is easier (and more efficient, as a nonquestioning business executive might say) to go about our daily affairs without questioning everything. It’s natural and quite sensible to behave this way. The neurologist John Kounios observes⁸ that the brain finds ways to reduce our mental workload, and one way is to accept without question (or even to just ignore) much of what is going on around us at any time. We operate on autopilot—which can help us to save mental energy, allow us to multitask, and enable us to get through the daily grind.

But when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it’s necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

With the constant change we face today, we may be forced to spend less time on autopilot, more time in questioning mode—attempting to adapt, looking to re-create careers, redefining old ideas about living, working, and retiring, reexamining priorities, seeking new ways to be creative, or to solve various problems in our own lives or the lives of others. We’ve transitioned into always transitioning,⁹ according to the author and futurist John Seely Brown. In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions—and, just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised—can be the first steps in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

How can we develop and improve this ability to question? Can we rekindle that questioning spark we had at age four? During my conversations and visits with more than a hundred business innovators, scientists, artists, engineers, filmmakers, educators, designers, and social entrepreneurs, they shared methods of asking questions and solving problems. Some shared stories of how questioning guided their careers or their businesses. Others recounted how a particular question helped change their life. Many offered insights, techniques, and tips on the art of inquiry.

Based on their experience—while also borrowing ideas and influences from existing theories of creativity, design thinking, and problem solving—I devised a three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful questions. It’s not a formula, per se—there is no formula for questioning. It’s more of a framework designed to help guide one through various stages of inquiry—because ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and ends with taking action on a particular question.

A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That’s why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.

This book is structured around questions, with one leading to another. Forty-four questions divide up sections within the chapters, and lots more questions are embedded within each section. The thirty question sidebars scattered throughout the book tell stories of breakthrough ideas, innovations, or new ways of thinking that began with a powerful (and sometimes offbeat) question. A Question Index is at the back of the book—because if facts are entitled to an index, then why not questions?

As to what, exactly, constitutes a beautiful question: When I first launched the idea behind this book as the blog A More Beautiful Question, I laid out the following entirely subjective definition:

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.

That definition makes clear that this book is not about grand philosophical or spiritual questions—Why are we here? How does one define good? Is there life after death?—all of those great questions that spark endless, impassioned debate. I am not particularly qualified to discuss such questions, nor do they fit within the category of what I would call actionable questions.

The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change. The esteemed physicist Edward Witten¹⁰ told me that in his work he is always searching for a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.

We don’t often ask such questions; they’re not the kind of queries typically typed into the Google search box. While it could be said that ours is a Golden Age of Questioning—with all the online resources now available for getting instant answers, it’s reasonable to assume people are asking more questions than ever before—that distinction would be based purely on volume, not necessarily on the quality or thoughtfulness of the questions being asked. Indeed, on Google, some of the most popular queries¹¹ are which celebrity is or isn’t gay. In many cases, our Google queries are so unimaginative and predictable that Google can guess what we’re asking before we’re three words into typing it.

This book is more concerned with questions that Google cannot easily anticipate or properly answer for you—questions that require a different kind of search. What is the fresh idea that will help my business stand out? What if I come at my work or my art in a whole different way? How might I tackle a long-standing problem that has affected my community, my family? These are individualized, challenging, and potentially game-changing questions.

In my inquiry into the value of inquiry, I’ve become convinced that questioning is more important today than it was yesterday—and will be even more important tomorrow—in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunity lies, and how to get there. We’re all hungry for better answers. But first, we need to learn how to ask the right questions.

Chapter 1

The Power of Inquiry

If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?

What can a question do?

What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?

Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?

Is knowing obsolete?

Why does everything begin with Why?

How do you move from asking to action?

If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?

Back in 1976, long before there¹ was a Google to field all of our queries, a young man named Van Phillips started asking the question above, first in his head and then aloud. Phillips felt his future depended upon finding a good answer, and no one seemed to have one for him.

He was twenty-one years old and had been living the charmed life of an athletic, handsome, and bright young college student. But one day in the summer of that year, Phillips’s fortunes changed. He was water-skiing on a lake in Arizona when a small fire broke out on the boat pulling him. In the ensuing confusion, the boat’s driver didn’t see that a second motorboat, coming around a blind curve in the lake, was headed straight at Phillips.

Phillips awoke from anesthesia the next morning in a hospital. He recalls, I did the proverbial ‘I don’t want to look, but let’s see’ and checked under his blanket to find an empty place where my left foot should have been. The limb had been severed, just below the knee, by the other boat’s propeller.

At the hospital, Phillips was fitted with a pink foot attached to an aluminum tube. The foot wasn’t much more than a block of wood with foam rubber added; such was the state of prosthetic limbs at the time. Phillips left the hospital with instructions: Get used to your new best friend, walk on it twice a day, and toughen up that stump. One of the first times he tried to walk on the foot, Phillips recalls, he tripped on a pebble the size of a pea. He knew, right then, this was not going to work for him. He recalls visiting his girlfriend’s parents’ house around that time, and being taken aside by her father, who said, Van—you’re just going to have to learn to accept this. When he heard that, Phillips recalls, "I bit my tongue. I knew he was right, in a way—I did have to accept that I was an amputee. But I would not accept the fact that I had to wear this foot."

At that moment, Phillips exhibited one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality. He’d shown other signs before that in childhood—as a kid, he once went through his house and removed all the doorknobs (mischievous What If I take this apart? childhood stories are common among questioners). But now, as an adult, he was experiencing a critical Why moment, as in Why should I settle for this lousy foot?

This did not seem an unreasonable question to Phillips, particularly since he was very aware—as was everyone else at the time—that amazing things were happening in the world of technology, particularly in the U.S. space program. Hence, he naturally wondered why some of the vast means and know-how that enabled a man to walk on the moon couldn’t somehow be applied to his down-to-earth problem.

What he hadn’t thought of at that time—it would become clear to him later, as he got to know more about the field of prosthetics—was that some problems do not have governments or large corporations rushing to solve them. The prosthetics industry had been in a time warp for decades, Phillips recalls. No one was investing in it because the customer base, amputees, was no one’s idea of an attractive business market. But this worked to my advantage in a way, Phillips told me, years later. Since progress had been stalled for so long, it left plenty of room to question outdated approaches and status quo practices—and to inject much-needed fresh thinking.

Still, Phillips quickly found, as a naïve questioner sometimes does, that his Why and What If inquiries weren’t particularly welcome in the realm of What Is. Frequently in various professional domains—in hospitals or doctors’ offices, in business conference rooms, even in classrooms—basic, fundamental questions can make people impatient and even uncomfortable. Phillips’s questions about why there weren’t better prosthetic limbs, and whether that could be changed, could be taken as a challenge to the expertise of those who knew far more than he did on the subject—the doctors, the prosthetics engineers, and others who understood what was possible at the time.

As an outsider in that domain, Phillips was actually in the best position to ask questions. One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’² If you know, there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on expert knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

Phillips was not going to convince the experts that he knew better (and in fact, he didn’t know better—he only suspected). Somewhere along the line, he took another critical step for a questioner tackling a challenge: He took ownership of that question, Why can’t they make a better foot? To do this, he had to make a change of pronouns: Specifically, he had to replace they with I.

This is an important concept, as explained by the small, independent inventor and inveterate questioner Mark Noonan, who once, after suffering³ his umpteenth backache from shoveling snow, wondered, Why don’t they come up with a better shovel? Noonan solved the problem himself, inventing a shovel with a long handle, a lever, and a wheel—when you use it, you no longer have to bend your back. Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining. And that situation you’re complaining about may never change because, as Regina Dugan, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, has observed about problems in general, We think someone else—someone smarter⁴ than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.

When Van Phillips realized that he was going to have to answer his own question, he also understood, almost immediately, that to inquire about prosthetics in a meaningful way he would have to wade into that world. He had been a broadcast major in college, but now changed directions and enrolled in one of the top prosthetics study programs in the United States, at Northwestern University, from whence he found work in a prosthetics lab in Utah. He began to understand how and why prosthetic limbs were designed the way they were.

He would spend nearly a decade grappling with his original question, then forming new ones, and eventually acting upon those. Phillips’s journey of inquiry led him to some unusual places: He extracted lessons from the animal kingdom and borrowed influences from his local swimming pool as well as from the battlefields of ancient China.

In his pursuit of a better foot, he faltered many times—literally, he fell to the ground again and again. This would happen as he was trying to answer his latest question (I wonder if this prototype will hold up better than the last one?) by taking it for a test run. He would receive his disappointing answer each time the new version of the foot broke under him. He would curse and swear, and then, inevitably, he would begin to ask new questions—attempting to understand and learn from each of his failures.

Then one day, the foot under him didn’t break. And Phillips knew, at that moment, that he was about to change the world.

What can a question do?

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions "are the engines of intellect⁵—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry. Fischer’s engine is just one of many metaphors that have been used to try to describe the surprising power that questions have. Questions are sometimes seen as spades that help to unearth buried truths; or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), shine a light on where you need⁶ to go."

The late Frances Peavey, a quirky,⁷ colorful social activist whose work revolved around what she called strategic questioning aimed at bridging cultural differences between people, once observed that a good question is like a lever used to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.

Maybe we talk about what a question is like because it’s hard to wrap our minds around what it actually is. Many tend to think of it as a form of speech—but that would mean if you didn’t utter a question, it wouldn’t exist, and that’s not the case. A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.

We do know that the ability to question, whether verbally or through other means, is one of the things that separates us from lower primates. Paul Harris, an education professor⁸ at Harvard University who has studied questioning in children, observes, Unlike other primates, we humans are designed so that the young look to the old for cultural information. He sees this as an important evolutionary divide—that from an early age, even before speech, humans will use some form of questioning to try to gain information. A child may pick up a kiwi fruit and indicate, through a look or gesture directed at a nearby adult, a desire to know more. Chimpanzees don’t do this; they may ask for a treat through signaling, but it’s a simple request for food, as opposed to an information-seeking question.

Reviews

Kind of stunned at the "thought provoking" comments. What a revelation! Asking questions! How is inquisitiveness, or simple "I wonder..." thinking so surprising to so many reviewers? Berger put together a collection of anecdotes (from a lot of other anecdote sources), and gets some credit for that research. Bottom line, this is Gladwell level fluff. Maybe a touch better. Gladwell's a tool.

I started getting weekend read recommendations from Scribd, three per Saturday, and this was a recommendation. I expect some of the others to be better.

Nitpick: Berger said in relating one of the anecdotes something about an "ATM machine". Seriously? That's one of the most annoying multiple double redundancies and a journalist should know better.

It took me a while to complete this book: despite it being relatively short and written in a very accessible style, it was dense with references and avenues for exploration, many of which I consulted as I read along.Whereas questioning as a method may seem simplistic, it's an effective tool to look beyond accepted answers. While many of us do it instinctively, we tend to focus on the answers rather than on the quality of the question. Already I have started to apply this method at work and found it's given me new frameworks to work from, opening my curiosity and listening more carefully to what is being said around me.I'm sure there's a lot more to be done in the strategic thinking realm, but this book is definitely an excellent first stop which will help to reframe and rethink the way we do business.

I only read the free preview, would like to read the rest at a less busy time. I've been asking questions my life long and have been trying to convert my students to do the same. It seems the author has the same principles in mind. My motto I try to teach is summarised in three symbols: ? * ! Lets change the world in three symbols: Inquire... ? ....... Envision... * ........ Inspire ... !

I was walking around Politics and Prose in Washington DC when I came upon this relative thin book. The title intrigued me so I started look into it. At first the book did not appeal to me much, although some of the chapters did seem interesting. I ended up buying it as a part of my personal mission to find anything and everything regarding improving myself and spurring my thinking process.I am very glad that I did because this book has turned into one of those books that has affected my world view as well as changed my way of thinking. The basic premise is not all that revolutionary: In order to be more creative, to think better, to be innovative, one needs to ask better, more probing questions. Do you see that I wasn't all that impressed?As I read the book, bits of wisdom and sparks of recognition came to me slowly but steadily. Warren Berger laid out a very convincing case that we, as a culture had become, through our own impatience and lazy assumptions unlearned our own ability to ask questions. We have become quite good as asking bad questions, lazy question, shallow questions, wrong questions. As I read the book, I became more systematic about underlining key ideas, I became more engrossed in the art and practice of asking questions. Berger gives us a lot of precedence, as will any good business book writer, but he also challenges us with the questions that he was asking. It is all very meta and coupled. I must say that his process hooked me and made me think longer and more in depth about how I think and ask questions. In the end I had mind mapped the entire book and I am going through the process of creating a cheat sheet of the lessons learned for myself as I am convinced that I will need to be reminded of the practice of asking questions in my daily life. You can say that I liked this book, quite a bit.